I’m surprised that this was not covered anywhere and that I didn’t notice it. Sensis. BidSmart service was down from March 10 through 15. We have a small BidSmart campaign running for our Inkfast online ink and toner business – this runs separately to our retail newsagency and easily accounts for more ink and toner sales in a week than our shop processes in a month.
If Google AdWords was down I’m sure there would be reports. It’s a bit like someone turning off your marketing campaign. But we didn’t notice. Frankly, the BidSmart campaign was all but forgotten. Until Sensis emails us to advice that it had been off the air. Their apology email resulted in us logging in and revising the campaign. If we didn’t miss it surely there is a problem?
While I was playing with BidSmart today I saw some amazing traffic stats for some keywords which newsagents could play with – I’m not about to go into details here though.
I think Sensis as a search engine gets approx 5% of total Australian search page impressions (I don’t have the Nielsen stats in front of me right at the moment though – I’m only going off recollection). If you apply this same % (and perhaps even less) and say that is the average volume of what BidSmart makes up of an “average” paid search campaign, its less likely the advertiser would notice.
4 of the 5 downtime days fell into the last Sun-Saturday week too- perhaps if weekly monitoring is done on campaigns by advertisers it would only be noticed come the following Monday (ie today) at the earliest. Maybe it will get some coverage in search circles sometime this week?